Well, it's over now.

So I got an email from my attorney on Friday and it's official - I'm divorced. I read the words over and over letting them sink in. The first thing I felt was that uncomfortable prickly feeling like when you are embarassed. What was that all about? I was sitting alone in my home reading my private email. Embarassment? Why? Then the next thing I felt was an enormous weight leaving my shoulders. That has been there for the past year - almost to the day come to think of it - when I made the decision to leave my marriage. It's really over. The last thread tying me to this man is gone. I took a deep breath, slowly let it out and screamed, "Yes! I'm done!"

Just as I finished reading that message the man I am seeing knocked on my door. "I just got great news," I said to him. And showed him the message.

"No. not at all." I said. And I really didn't. After all, we've been separated for a year, and I only started seeing this man a couple of months.

He asked me if I was sad. I told him I was. Not because I wanted my ex-husband back, but it is a loss. A loss of the life I thought I would have, the loss of the family we wanted to have, the loss of my belief that you marry once and that is it. Over the last couple of days I have been putting a lot of feelings to rest. My guilt over leaving the man I promised to stick with forever; my self-denegration for having a failed marriage; self-loathing for ever entering into a marriage with a self-destructive and emotionally abusive alcoholic and thinking somehow that life was good enough for me.

And what happens now? For eight years all my plans for the future necessarily included another person. Now what? I only have to plan for myself? The thought is liberating and at the same time terrifying. I can go anywhere I want and do anything I want. But there is no one to share the thrill and no one to lean against when it gets tough. I will be 36 in a couple of weeks and I am planning a whole new life starting now. What's next?